


Caretakers

by LadySilver



Series: Upended [6]
Category: The Tomorrow People (1992)
Genre: AU, Future Fic, Gen, au bingo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-04
Updated: 2012-02-04
Packaged: 2017-10-30 14:05:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,570
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/332550
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadySilver/pseuds/LadySilver
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Tomorrow People thought they were the next stage of human evolution. They were missing a few details.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Caretakers

The path of the future changed suddenly and without any warning.

“Every kid in the world could be a Tomorrow Person,” Adam had said, and Lisa had known that he was right. Every kid _could_ be. Every kid _would_ be, in time. The ship had moaned loudly after Adam’s pronouncement as if confirming what he’d had to say, though no one ever knew for sure if the ship understood them or would ever be able to make itself understandable, to tell them more or help them figure out what to do next. Adam and Lisa were teenagers then, full of hope and expectations for a future that they would be able to help shape. With their powers, and their limitations, the future would have to be a better place, a more peaceful place.

“It’s just the ones that feel different, feel like they don’t fit in,” Adam had said, as if that didn’t describe every teenager in the world. Or maybe that description was the point, the proof of how every kid was already a Tomorrow Person, each waiting for the chance to pursue his or her potential. Each waiting to be called on to help save the world. The spaceship they stood in only seemed to further confirm the promise of Adam’s words. They were in a _spaceship_ on an island that could only be reached via teleportation. What could be cooler? Around them played the speckled sunlight as it was filtered through the ocean water, this light being more than the ship had the strength to generate on its own.

For awhile, Adam’s prediction held promise. In short order, Megabyte broke out, then Ami, then Jade. There were a handful of others. Just a handful. It was easy to ignore the destitution of the ship, its age, the fact that it had crashlanded and lay half buried in the sand with no one interested in rescuing it.

Lisa walked away for awhile, afraid for herself, for her mother. Afraid of what she could do, and more afraid of what she couldn’t do. She wasn’t strong enough to save the world, and she couldn’t imagine why anyone had ever thought otherwise. So many of the others fell because they couldn’t walk, or because they didn’t want to, and each time Lisa felt a little more confident in her decision.

Then, as if nature realized the mistake it was making with this branch of humanity, it stopped producing Tomorrow People. No more kids broke out.

Lisa couldn’t stay away from the ship forever. Her resolve weakened or her priorities shifted; the difference didn’t matter. Only a few people from the billions around the world were like her and she couldn’t cut herself off from them. Didn’t want to anymore. And the kind of saving the world needed wasn’t the kind that the Tomorrow People could help with. All their powers couldn’t help against corrupt politicians and short-sighted corporate interests and depleting world resources. They needed each other to remind themselves of what they were, and what they thought they were supposed to be. They needed each other to keep the fire going. Even though their powers were wrong for what needed doing, they had to keep trying.

They were in their thirties and forties when they all reunited back on the island. The ship’s central column lit up on their return, the alien symbols written on it blazed a welcome like they’d never seen before. Any tension that the reunion should have brought vanished, and they fell right into conversation as if it had been days since they had last seen each other and not decades. When it was ready for their attention, the ship called. Its moan was more of a rumble, a sound pitched to be felt rather than heard. All of the Tomorrow People stopped what they were doing, cutting off sentences or breaking away from casual hugs, to bring their attention to the column. They understood: They’d been summoned.

“Why are we here?” Adam asked, speaking, as usual, for their group. He had been the first of them to break out. Whether he wanted to be or not, this meant that the others always looked to him. Even Lisa, who’d barely seen him over the past two decades, couldn’t help but let him speak first.

The ship hummed a response, one longer than a simple greeting would be.

Kevin tilted his head to the side, listening. As the only one among them who had always been in touch with his telepathic abilities, he had a greater affinity with the ship and could make sense of it on a level that the others could not. “We named ourselves wrong,” Kevin translated. He’d grown into a stocky man, medium height, his close cropped brown hair starting to thin. Though ambivalent about his mindreading in his youth, he’d turned them to his advantage as an adult in his career as a counselor. His career made him practiced at projecting confidence even when he didn’t feel it. Right now he looked anything but confident.

“What do you mean? Why would it bring us here to say that?” Jade asked. She’d grown tall and slender and wore her blonde hair piled high on top of her head. She was pursuing a career on stage, an outlet for her adventurous streak and an excuse for her to travel a lot. If anyone was going to ask the nosey questions, it would be her. She planted herself square on with the column, making no brook about whom she spoke to. “We didn’t name ourselves. We’re the Tomorrow People. That’s what we are.”

A grin appeared on Megabyte’s face and Lisa could see the quip forming in his head. He’d always been the one quick to pun, often before assessing whether his puns would be welcome. Before Lisa could say anything, Jade elbowed him. Hard. She didn’t even turn around first; it was like she had positioned herself exactly for that moment. Megabyte rubbed at the spot on his ribs. “What did you do that for?” he demanded, the expectation that he’d be immediately answered to his satisfaction strong in his tone. He was the last person Lisa could picture as a military man, yet he was. He’d followed his father into the service where he’d become an intelligence officer. Lisa was sure there was a joke in that, somewhere.

Lisa caught Ami’s eye and shook her head. Ami offered an exaggerated eye-roll back, and Lisa had to bite back a wholly inappropriate laugh. So much had changed over the last decades, and yet here the six of them were, falling comfortably into patterns of behavior that they’d established as kids and teens—Patterns that had a tendency to get in the way of a job’s completion. All of them were old enough to know better. That they were lapsing so quickly bespoke how attuned they had all been to each other, even when they had gone for years without any contact, much less the kind for which they were uniquely equipped.

Ami had gone on to become a novelist. She specialized in young adult books, a genre which allowed her to take advantage of the frequent invitations to lecture at schools and libraries around the world to search for new Tomorrow People. She’d chosen that career before any of them realized how futile the search would turn out to be. Her success with the books kept her writing, and the constant invitations kept her hoping.

Jade shook her head. “What do you mean?” she asked again, addressing Kevin, who still had a listening expression on, even though the ship appeared to be silent on both the auditory and telepathic levels.

Adam stepped up the central column and rested a hand on it, forming a connection with the ship similar to the one Kevin already and always had. “Kevin’s right,” he said, after a moment. “We… _I_ …got our name wrong.”

Lisa had chosen to go to medical school and become a doctor. She’d decided to focus on general medicine because she liked knowing a little bit about everything. Only once—and only to a mirror—had she ever admitted the real reason for her choice: she needed to be able to help people, even when her powers weren’t the answer. Maybe, _because_ her powers weren’t the answer. “What did we get wrong?” she asked, in sudden exasperation. The smell of sea salt and dead fish was strong down here in this spaceship that had been partially buried on the desert island so many millennia ago, and she didn’t want to stay here longer than necessary with the memories those smells dredged up from those horrible days in her youth when she’d discovered her powers. “The _tomorrow_ part?” The answer was obvious to her. How could they be the Tomorrow People, the next stage in human evolution, if their line was so clearly a dead end. She didn’t need her medical studies to make it clear that six people were not a viable population on which to build a race. One of the others who could understand the ship, Kevin or Adam, would have to say yes, formally and officially, and then they’d be able to leave. She wasn’t adverse to spending more time with the group; she just didn’t want to do it _here_.

Kevin pulled a funny face, as if not sure he was hearing correctly. He hesitated as he spoke his answer, inserting pauses between the words. “The _people_ part?”

Lisa opened her mouth to make a retort, demand clarification. She didn’t get a chance to speak. She felt a _push_ in her head. No other word could describe it. Her whole body rocked back as a connection was formed between the ship and her mind and the minds of the other five, and it was exactly like pieces snapping into place that had always jammed up against each other before. A friction she hadn’t fully understood was there, vanished. The seven of them were joined in way she’d never known was possible, even with her telepathy and the mind merges and mind melds they had all shared at some point. They were joined, and they were so much _more_ than she had ever known possible.

A breeze wafted through the ship, emanating from the column and leaving cold, clean air behind.  The grit of sand that had been crunching under her feet vanished, leaving a clear, smooth surface behind. The ship was waking up, healing itself—able to now that it had them to draw on.

 _We’re the Tomorrow People_ , Adam re-stated with all the certainty behind it that nearly twenty-years of accepting it as truth had created. _We’re the future of the human race._

 _No_ , the ship responded. _Yes_.

Before, Lisa would have rolled her eyes. Now she could see all the conclusions and contradictions laid out in her head.

She saw the ship—not a spaceship at all, but a timeship—sent from a distant future, maybe an alternate future, one where humanity had never learned to control its impulses and understand its instincts. That humanity hadn’t wiped itself out, but it come so close on so many occasions. That humanity had reached for its potential, and loosed it from its grasp—only to fall harder and farther each time. That humanity finally recognized that the leadership and guidance, the singular vision, it needed couldn’t be found in one person or one institution. Individual humans were too temporary, too prone to selfishness and spitefulness and the preservation of territories, especially in the name of peace and love. Institutions were worse, prone as they were to rotting slowly and with far greater influence. So, that humanity set out to eradicate itself by engineering the solution it had finally recognized that it needed.

The timeship was sent back to find a handful of people who could represent various facets of a mind, who would still be human but who could balance with the selected others to be the best of Humanity. The selected people would stand outside the race and look in, telling it where to go and where to avoid, but guiding through empathy and sympathy because they had been and would always be members of the species.

Something went wrong and the ship overshot its target time and location by thousands of years.

It had to wait. Eventually Humanity could grow enough under its own power to be helped the rest of the way. Until then, the ship couldn’t do anything except monitor and hope.

There were so many false starts and failed promises. So many people were found who were close, but not close enough. Minds caved under the pressure, societies caved under the fear. Over and over, the chosen were hunted down and persecuted, or “saved,” or slaughtered. There were accidents. So much potential was lost from the chosens’ simply inability to swim, to fight off a germ, to figure out how to leave the island. Each time, the ship had to start over. Each time, it had fewer reserves to work with.

By accident, Adam found the ship. It shouldn’t have happened. The reserves were too far gone by then, the honing beacon barely functional and badly misaligned. Sometimes success did come down to luck. Once it had Adam, the ship used him as the template to track down the others who would best fit, which was why they shared so much in common, even as they came from different parts of the world.

Now they were all here and ready. The ship had called them, found them, brought them in. Then it had let them go. Adam, Ami, Kevin, Lisa, Megabyte, and Jade were each a stone that needed shaping through friction and time and wrong decisions and hard calls until it was ready, and now they were.

Time and again, Humanity had tried and failed to invent gods for itself. It knew it needed them, needed a higher power to help reign itself in and give it a reason to stretch outward. It needed an external force to keep it from turning in, on, and against itself. It needed something more powerful to say “You can’t,” so that it could respond, “Watch me” in all the right ways.

The six had been picked to fulfill that need. Each, in his or her own way, had tried to fill a piece of it in their human endeavors without realizing that they were acting on a larger expectation. They weren’t the people of tomorrow, and never had been. After years of waiting and training, the people who now stood on the ship had been called to fulfill the goals of their distant descendents who had sent for them, who so desperately needed them.

Lisa smiled to herself and could feel the others smiling as they understood what was being asked, and as they accepted the role that had been requested. Never again would she have to worry about how to keep her mother safe or about why she’d been given powers that couldn’t solve the problems of the world. The first she’d be able to do easily now; the second, well, that would take a little more time and patience, but they had both.

Kevin was right: they had gotten their name wrong. They weren’t the Tomorrow People; they were the caretakers of tomorrow’s people.

**Author's Note:**

> Fulfills my AU Bingo prompt #9: Deities/Higher Powers


End file.
